Oh, I just got my goat up reading an article by @meathead from 2014 in the Huffington Post. He’s trying to claim bean sprouts are more dangerous than pork!

Than Pork!

Hey @meathead, before you go ripping on my favorite sprout, do your homework.

All four sproutbreaks in 2016 were from alfalfa sprouts, not bean sprouts, and there were none in 2015. When you wrote the article, in 2014, there were two from bean sprouts, one from chia seed, and one from clover sprouts. There were also outbreaks in cheese, rice, fish, nut butter, and caramel apples.

And there were none in sprouts in 2013.

You can review the outbreak investigations at http://www.fda.gov/Food/RecallsOutbreaksEmergencies/Outbreaks/ucm272351.htm#outbreaks

I’m not going to say the risk with sprouts isn’t real. It is. And its a risk we take very seriously. We only purchase seed that’s been tested for salmonella and e. coli. We wash the seed in an antimicrobial treatment before sprouting. We use sanitary practices in our facility. And we test all our sprouts for salmonella, listeria and e.coli before we release them to the public.

Sprouts are at risk because the conditions for growing sprouts are ideal for growing anything. We are the canary in the coal mine of food safety. That’s why we work so hard to keep our sprouts clean.

But there’s a bigger issue here, and that’s a broken food system.

If you look at the fda outbreak website, you’ll see there have been contaminations of strawberries, peppers, romaine, milk, and of course meat. The real issue is confined feedlots, where they pump animals (yes, your beloved pig) with low levels of antibiotics where superbugs can develop. These feedlots have two outputs: meat and manure. The meat we grill or smoke on the barbeque. The manure doesn’t get flushed down the toilet. Its a rich source of nitrogen. Most commercial feedlots spread their manure on crops nearby, and they introduce these superbugs into our food system.

So @meathead, before you go claiming there’s more danger eating pho than smoked brisket, do your homework. More people die from mishandled meat in a year than have died in all vegetable outbreaks in a decade. Meat is so contaminated, they don’t even do outbreak investigations, they just assume it’s dangerous. The acceptable level for salmonella or e. coli in sprouts is 0, while in commercial meat it is billions of cells.

Fact is, if there’s a contamination in a sprout farm, the grower is mishandling their sprouts. Salmonella and E. Coli come from contaminated seed. Listeria from a dirty facility. To read the reports on some of these plants is truly sickening. But so are the reports on bad meat plants.

I want Alaskans to know where their sprouts come from. And to know that you can be confident that Alaska Sprouts is vigilant when it comes to food safety.

And @meathead, I hope you cook that brisket all the way through. It gets pretty dangerous if you don’t.